I recently got very disappointed by any markup language i was using for my django forum, wiki and blog - basically because BBCode and Markdown are all easy to write but very limiting, while (X)HTML is powerful, but hard to write by hand. (Actually I found it easier to write HTML than to work around bbcode limitations for another part of my blog (which is still not finished, but not due to html :) ))

So when someone on the SCT forum started to ask why I was using markdown in the wiki I sparked a small discussion about the pros/cons of WYSIWYG vs. editing markup by hand. I even carried it over to another thread.

So what are the pros and cons of WYSIWYG?

• +: Very userfriendly (if done right)
  
• +: Very powerful (you can add custom features, like wiki links, inserting attachments as images, resizing/alt texts of images, etc.)
  
• +: You don't need to learn a new markup language for every forum, wiki or blog
  
• -: Security might be a problem - you need to validate (X)HTML very carefully to avoid XSS
  
• -: Some might want to edit pages offline, or manage them in a text based version control system.
  
• -: Diffs are not that straight forward
  
• -: Hard to do "right" (WYSIWYG is not that simple and might require extra work for every browser - and you need extensions for your forum/wiki/blog features)
  

So - does anyone have other pros/cons for wysiwyg vs. markup editing? any experiences? :)